Best Before: The Evolution and Future of Processed Food

By Nicola Temple

The whole story behind what's in the food on our plate.

Long before there was the ready meal, humans processed food to preserve it and make it safe. From fire to fermentation, our ancestors survived periods of famine by changing the very nature of their food. This ability to process food has undoubtedly made us one of the most successful species on the planet, but have we gone too far?

Through manipulating chemical reactions and organisms, scientists have unlocked methods of improving food longevity and increasing supply, from apples that stay fresh for weeks to cheese that is matured over days rather than months. And more obscure types of food processing, such as growing steaks in a test-tube and 3D-printed pizzas, seem to have come straight from the pages of a science-fiction novel. These developments are keeping up with the changing needs of the demanding consumer, but we only notice them when the latest scaremongering headline hits the news.

Best Before puts processed food into perspective. It explores how processing methods have evolved in many of the foods that we love in response to big business, consumer demand, health concerns, innovation, political will, waste and even war. Best Before arms readers with the information they need to be rational consumers, capable of making informed decisions about their food.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Feb 22, 2018
• ISBN: 9781472941404

Nicola Temple

Nicola Temple is a biologist, conservationist and science writer. She was raised on a smallholding in rural Ontario, Canada, where she spent her days catching terrapins and fireflies. After spending 10 years as a conservation biologist, Nicola became a full-time writer, and is now based in Bristol. Her writing has taken her from the precipices of volcanoes in Ethiopia to the banks of salmon streams in Canada's temperate rainforest. nicolatemple.com / @nicolatemple

Book preview

Bloomsbury

Also available in the Bloomsbury Sigma series:

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p53: The Gene that Cracked the Cancer Code by Sue Armstrong

Atoms Under the Floorboards by Chris Woodford

Spirals in Time by Helen Scales

Chilled by Tom Jackson

A is for Arsenic by Kathryn Harkup

Breaking the Chains of Gravity by Amy Shira Teitel

Suspicious Minds by Rob Brotherton

Herding Hemingway’s Cats by Kat Arney

Electronic Dreams by Tom Lean

Sorting the Beef from the Bull by Richard Evershed and Nicola Temple

Death on Earth by Jules Howard

The Tyrannosaur Chronicles by David Hone

Soccermatics by David Sumpter

Big Data by Timandra Harkness

Goldilocks and the Water Bears by Louisa Preston

Science and the City by Laurie Winkless

Bring Back the King by Helen Pilcher

Furry Logic by Matin Durrani and Liz Kalaugher

Built on Bones by Brenna Hassett

My European Family by Karin Bojs

4th Rock from the Sun by Nicky Jenner

Patient H69 by Vanessa Potter

Catching Breath by Kathryn Lougheed

PIG/PORK by Pía Spry-Marqués

The Planet Factory by Elizabeth Tasker

Wonders Beyond Numbers by Johnny Ball

Immune by Catherine Carver

I, Mammal by Liam Drew

Reinventing the Wheel by Bronwen and Francis Percival

Making the Monster by Kathryn Harkup

Bloomsbury

Contents

Introduction: I’ll Have That with a Side of Pragmatism Please

Chapter 1: Have We Tinkered Too Much?

Chapter 2: Maturity Doesn’t Necessarily Come with Age

Chapter 3: Breaking Bread

Chapter 4: Ripe for the Picking

Chapter 5: Processing Protein

Chapter 6: No Added Sugar

Chapter 7: The Convenience Conundrum

Chapter 8: Really Really Small Stuff

Chapter 9: The Future of Food Processing

Selected References

Acknowledgements

Index

INTRODUCTION

I’ll Have That with a Side of Pragmatism Please

I grew up on a homestead in rural Ontario, Canada. Ten blissful acres on which to lose myself as a child. We had a few sheep, a couple of dozen chickens, a pig named Bessie, a dairy cow called Penny and so many raised garden beds that people driving by no doubt wondered whether our farm doubled as a graveyard. I even had a mallard duck named Slipper who had imprinted on me as a hatchling and followed me everywhere. We grew as much of our own food as we could. And it was here that I first learned about processing food.

For several weekends throughout the summer and autumn, our small kitchen would be converted into a food-processing facility, filled with produce from the garden. No surface was left uncovered. There were pots of water boiling on the stove top and bowls of ice-cold water lined up along the wooden butcher-block counter from the stove top all the way to our Harvest Gold fridge. Freezer bags were at the ready and colanders, knives and chopping boards were in abundance. My mum and her friend Maureen, my grandmother and I, would be poised to process the garden’s bounty so that we would have fruit and vegetables throughout the winter and spring.

My baby sister was plunked into one of those gravity-defying high-chairs that attached right to the table with suction cups and we set to work like a well-oiled machine. My mum worked the stove and the ice bowls, while Maureen and my grandmother prepared the veg. I was relegated to writing the name and date on the freezer bag (as if anyone couldn’t tell it was corn in that clear bag) until I was responsible enough to wield a knife. My sister’s job was to consume any vegetable product that fell within her grasp.

We blanched cob after cob of corn, trimming it off the cob (my grandma always cut too deep into the cob) and packaging it up for freezing. Cucumbers and onions were pickled. Beans were trimmed and peas were shucked and all were blanched and frozen. Fruit was frozen, pureed or preserved as jams. By midday, the floor would be sticky with berries and corn starch, there would be corn silk everywhere and we would all be dripping in sweat from the humidity of the boiling pots. If we stood to work, our backs ached. If we sat, our thighs and sweat-soaked backs would stick to the orange vinyl kitchen chairs (oh yes, we were terribly in vogue). And yet, this never felt like work. This was a social event. Particularly if a bottle of wine was opened in the afternoon and especially if my grandmother had left early. It was then that my mum and her friend would bring up outrageous stories from the past while I tried to make myself invisible in the corner, chopping in silence. It was ... enlightening. And, like most of my great memories in life, food was the centrepiece.

I had a privileged childhood. We didn't have a lot of money, but we had plenty of good food. I knew, sometimes in graphic detail, where good food came from and how it was prepared. My sister, who was either less pragmatic or more empathetic than me (probably both), became a lifelong vegetarian under the weight of this intimate knowledge.

As I sought autonomy, I rebelled against anything wholemeal. In school I envied the kids who had sandwiches made with thin, tasteless, white, fluffy pre-sliced bread. Mine was brown, dense and could easily have been used to hold the classroom door open. It was a revelation when I learned that pizza didn’t have to have a two-inch-thick rectangular wholemeal crust!

When I had an income of my own, I took every opportunity to sample ready meals and fast food. It was bliss. I lived above a fish and chip shop for a while for goodness’ sake, I didn’t stand a chance! Luckily, any subtle nuances to my health as a result of my poor diet were clearly masked by the overwhelming flavour of youth.

I returned to my wholesome food roots eventually.

When I started to do extensive research for my first book, entitled Sorting the Beef from the Bull: The Science of Food Fraud Forensics, which I co-authored with Professor Richard Evershed, I learned of food horror stories I never thought possible. I read about plastic rice, fake eggs and putrid meat dipped in bleach and re-directed into the human food chain. I learned about fake milk made with shampoo and urea, and sawdust coloured with toxic dyes to resemble ground spices. Horse meat in beef lasagne was tame by comparison. These were all clearly illegal and shocking examples of how criminals adulterate food for the sake of a quick buck (or millions of bucks in some cases). But equally disturbing were some of the stories that both Richard and I came across of what is legally done to our food. I shared these stories with anyone who would listen. In fact, some parents still run in the opposite direction when they see me at school drop-off. I soon realised that I was not the only one who was blissfully unaware of the many ways we manipulate our food.

As well as speaking with people, I read a (virtual) pile of papers in food science. I found a plethora of reports that were focused on finding more cost-effective ingredients for foods without significantly compromising the qualities of the product consumers had come to expect. These studies investigated things like mouthfeel, texture, appearance, melting point and structure, yet changes in nutritional value seemed largely ignored. Now, to be fair, I was researching fraud and looking for information regarding substitutions, but it still felt like a whole lot of jargon for looking to substitute cheaper ingredients without consumers noticing.

I’m not going to lie to you, when I began this book I thought it would be another exposé of the food industry filled with horrifying stories of how our food is manipulated. But as I got into it, my views started to shift slightly. With a better understanding of some of the processes and what drives them, things became less terrifying for me. I felt better equipped to make decisions around which processing methods aligned with my values and which didn’t. It turns out I’m not terribly fond of being misled.

But before I go there, a quick definition or two to ensure we are all talking about the same thing. Food processing is any action, chemical or mechanical, that is done to food in order to change it or preserve it. This includes packaging fresh products, such as carrots, in order to ensure they reach the consumer in the intended state, namely orange and crunchy. By default, this means that processed food is the product of any of these actions. So it is in this context that I use this term throughout.

This book explores the world of food processing, telling the story through a scientific lens with the aim of removing some of the uneasiness we (myself included) tend to feel when technology is married with food. It is one of the many reasons menus tend to be devoid of scientific jargon. Citric acid conjures up images of vats of skin-melting chemicals, while lemon juice brings to mind a hot summer’s day. Pyridoxal phosphate sounds somewhat intimidating, which is why we call it vitamin B6. Alternatively, ‘natural flavouring’ sounds wholesome and good for the Earth. Yet, in some cases there are very complicated chemical processes that are used to extract the desired flavour compound from the natural product. Castoreum, for example, is a US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved natural flavour that contains an aromatic compound similar to vanilla, called acetanisole. Castoreum, however, is chemically extracted from the dried and macerated castor sac scent glands of beavers. Needless to say, it’s not very widely used. Admittedly, current labelling laws don’t always make it easy to be a discerning consumer, but that is another book altogether.

As consumers, we should expect high standards of our food system. We are, after all, rather dependent on it and yet the extent of global food crime and diet-related disease, as well as the secrecy within the food industry, would suggest that some aspects of the system aren’t working as they should. And the timing couldn’t be worse. We face a burgeoning population with rapid urbanisation and environmental uncertainty. There is such an uneven distribution of food on our planet that 15 per cent of humans are hungry while 20 per cent are obese. Food security is one of the greatest challenges our society faces for the future. There are experts around the world using a diversity of approaches to address these issues, but it is mind-bogglingly complex and it will take time that we frankly may not have.

Considering the current challenges we face with food, it is impossible not to think about how this will shape the future of food. Popular culture has painted some interesting scenarios, from the obese, leisure-suit-wearing, screen-watching, nutrition-shake-sipping, planet-killing people portrayed in the animated film WALL-E to the disturbingly polluted and overpopulated world in Soylent Green where everyone is popping green processed high-energy wafers (which turn out to be a gruesome case of adulteration, but I won’t ruin it for you if you haven’t seen the film). Think tanks have also generated visions of possible food futures, which range from the complete collapse of agriculture due to the loss of pollinators to 3D printed food and lab-grown meat (Chapter 5). And although this can sound like science fiction, it is already happening, but I’ll get to that in Chapter 9.

But these are paralysing thoughts, and it is a time for empowerment, not debilitation! As consumers, our actions speak louder than words. We can help create the food future we envision through our purchasing decisions. To help us do that, we need to be informed and rational in our decision-making.

The ideas for this book started to form before Richard and I finished our book on food fraud. I was learning so much about how food is produced at an industrial scale and it was changing my understanding of processed food in two ways. First, when most of us refer to processed food, we generally mean highly processed or ultra-processed, ‘your grandma wouldn’t recognise this as food’ kind of processing. But the processed-food spectrum is broad. It can mean a quick rinse and wrap of some lettuce or engineering a nano-sized (10-9) emulsion in salad dressing to make it more stable ... and everywhere in between. And some foods may not sit where you would think on this spectrum. When I learned that an apple is photographed 100 times in order to calculate the blush (red on green) percentage and sort it for different retailer ‘blush’ preferences, I was surprised. I don’t really think of a whole apple as being processed, or maybe I just thought it was a far simpler bruises/no bruises sort of affair. If I needed to know the exact blush percentage of my apple (and I don’t), I do not have the tools to do this in my kitchen. Alternatively, I always thought that processed cheese slices were more of an oil-based product than dairy, yet as you will find out in Chapter 2, it was originally just cheddar that’s brought to a high temperature and whisked. If I did want to make processed cheese (unlikely) I do have the tools to do this in my kitchen.

Second, I was reminded of the story of processed food, which provides much-needed context. In my role as the primary meal-maker, a mother and a general advocate of good wholesome food, I was only seeing the over-packaged product on the supermarket shelf. The one that contains ingredients I don’t recognise and is allegedly making us all lazy and fat. Sure I see the convenience of it all, but I also feel the anonymity of it – the many unknown hands and machines that have made and delivered this product. But step back a bit and there is a very long and interesting story associated with food processing and even specific processed foods. Margarine, for example, came about as a result of shortages in edible animal fat in the 1860s. Emperor Louis Napoleon III offered a prize to anyone who could come up with a suitable substitute for butter. French chemist Hippolyte Mège-Mouriès mixed beef fat with skimmed milk and called it ‘oleomargarine’. It evolved, and with each step, more of the expensive animal fat was replaced with vegetable-based fat until treating vegetable oils with hydrogen (hydrogenation) allowed animal fat to be removed altogether. During the Second World War margarine became the popular choice as it was a cheaper alternative to butter; it helped people get by during times of hardship. Then it became the healthy alternative when people were told to cut down on animal fats. And then it became the unhealthy alternative as concerns were raised regarding the trans fats margarine contains. As we learned more and circumstances changed, margarine had to evolve in order to survive in the market. Equally important, once consumers had been exposed to this easily spreadable fat in a tub, some people weren’t willing to go back to hard butter. A new process of creating a spreadable vegetable-based fat had to be developed that didn’t create trans fats – and it was. It’s called interesterification, but let’s not get into that here.

My many discussions with friends, family, acquaintances and random people on social media made me realise that I wasn’t alone in having lost this context for food processing. We are focused on some negative perceptions, but should we throw out hundreds (sometimes thousands) of years of discovery because we’re appalled by chemically based bacon flavouring on a triangle of fried corn dough? Surely we should at least understand the path that brought us here, to analogues for everything from crisps to meat and cheese?

It’s only relatively recently that processed food has become a four-letter word – for generations before us it has helped make food more nutritionally accessible. As you’ll read in Chapter 1, cutting and cooking food made it far easier for early humans to absorb certain nutrients. When our ancestors started cooking food around 1.9 million years ago, it meant that some of that time and energy that would have been needed to chew and digest raw food could instead be used for other things. The resources for developing large jaw muscles, for example, could be redirected to perhaps store a little extra body fat and maybe even grow bigger brains; time spent chewing food could be spent socialising. Then when humans began preserving foods, nutrition was improved as nutrients were available beyond the normal growing seasons and through times of hardship. Sterilisation and other processing methods have helped to remove toxins that would otherwise make food unavailable to us. Essentially, processing food (alongside agriculture) has helped our species to overcome hunger and spend more time making babies rather than chasing down the next meal.

As if contributing to our success as a species isn’t a gripping enough plot, how and why different cultures evolved different processing methods is another lens through which the processed-food story can be told. Bread alone is a veritable treasure trove of anthropological insight.

An equally interesting plot is how products and methods have developed over time in response to the ever-changing sociocultural context, a shifting political and regulatory landscape and resource constraints. An outbreak can change how we handle food forever. War can limit access to resources and inspire innovation. A shift in traditional roles within the family can create a market for convenience. A natural disaster can change how we have to transport food. New scientific findings can bring to light health concerns that require us to find alternate ingredients. This information provides the much-needed context.

And last, but definitely not least, the science behind food processing offers yet another exciting storyline, and one of particular interest to me. Some of the methods and technologies developed initially for the food and beverage industry have had a significant impact in other industries, and vice versa. Louis Pasteur was as much a pioneer in reducing food spoilage as he was in preventative medicine. In his book Chilled, Tom Jackson gives an engaging history of refrigeration, which not only revolutionised the transportation and storage of food, but also enabled in-vitro fertilisation, the development of super-computers and even magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanners.

In this book, I’ve tried to weave these story lines together as much as possible in order to tell the story of how processed foods have evolved. Despite what we are often told, processed foods are not always the money-grabbing, addiction-forming, obesity-causing products of the big food manufacturers. Obviously some of them are some of these things, and some of them might be all of these things. But I aim to provide a different perspective by looking at how food processing, and more generally food science, gets pushed along the evolutionary path towards the latest new product. Some of these products enjoy the success of pre-sliced bread, while others go the way of Life-Savers flavoured soda (the beverage equivalent of the dodo).

Understanding this journey can perhaps help us identify if and when we started to go a bit off-track. It can help us to become discerning consumers who can identify when innovative ideas might benefit society and our planet and when they purely benefit company profits. Trained scientists and technicians are driving innovation, but we as consumers have the power to apply the brakes or sit in the passenger seat and yell ‘Go! Go! Go!’ And maybe we’ll drive off a cliff Thelma and Louise-style or maybe we’ll turn into the spin and get this behemoth that is the food industry on track. Time will tell. But I, for one, am not going to sit in the car and do nothing. Unless Brad Pitt is in the car, then I’ll probably just stare at him.

Alongside looking at some of the major scientific advances that have helped to evolve food processing, this book looks at the earliest origins of some of the oldest processed foods on the planet: cheese (Chapter 2) and bread (Chapter 3). I investigate how methods have changed over time, particularly in this last century, and question whether these changes have anything to do with health trends, such as a rise in gluten insensitivity. From there, Chapter 4 explores how our desire to have fresh lettuce, tomatoes and mangoes all year round have driven changes in the way we process our jet-setting fruits and vegetables. I discuss how peeling and chopping up some fruits and vegetables may be encouraging better eating habits, but look at what is needed in order to keep that fresh-cut produce fresh. Chapter 5 explores one of the first processed meat products – the sausage – and how our changing attitudes towards meat have transformed this product from a method designed to use and preserve the less desirable parts into a caramelised-onion-infused treat. I try to question our attitudes towards processing methods that aim to make as much use of the animal as possible. Chapter 6 is a discussion of our love-hate relationship with salt, sugar and fat, particularly how these have infiltrated the snack and processed-food industry and what it is taking to get them back out. In Chapter 7, I look at how the family unit has changed over the last century and how this has driven a yearning for convenience that has spawned a multitude of ready-made meals and other products that put more of our nutrition in the hands of the food industry. All things small are the topic of Chapter 8. Nanotechnology is already being used to grow, process and package our food and yet we know so little about it. What role is nanotechnology likely to play in the future of food processing, from the delivery of nutrients to smart packaging, and which of these technologies are we most likely to accept as consumers? Finally, in Chapter 9 I look at the future of food processing. It has played a significant part in our evolution and success as humans and it still has a significant role to play as we move forward into an era of environmental uncertainty and food insecurity. However, if we paint all food processing with the same brush of scepticism, we risk missing opportunities that might bring significant benefits and help us to overcome monumental challenges.

As a science writer, I love a good science story. But when it comes to my food, I can’t discard my home-grown hippie roots. In my lifetime I have gone from growing everything I eat (well, to be fair, my mum grew it), to being entirely dependent on strangers for my food (save the odd potato and sugar snap pea I grow in our back garden). As a mother, I feel as though I have failed my son in not giving him the homesteader upbringing both my husband and I had. But that guilt is served with a healthy side of pragmatism. As a family, we have made choices. I spend a lot of time preparing food ‘from scratch’, but I also have other things I want (and need) to do. The irony that I have had to rely on more processed foods while writing this book is not lost on me. We can’t afford, nor do we have the time to manage, a property for subsistence living. Nor do we have the skill, quite frankly – we would lose a lot of weight initially while we blundered through our early mistakes! And some things simply aren’t practical to make myself (I refer you to the tortilla incident in Chapter 3). There are so many things to weigh up when purchasing food. As I shop, I am considering numerous factors, including food miles, human and animal welfare, packaging, sustainability, taste, quality and cost. If only the weighing scale in the produce section could produce some magic ‘buy/don’t buy’ reading based on each consumer’s values. And so, like many people, I find myself facing the convenience conundrum: which of my values (which can shift on an hourly basis, I might add) am I willing to compromise in order to make my life a little easier?

Like it or not, we have developed an extremely complex global food system. Food processing has both enabled this complexity and adapted in response to it. We can’t go backwards, but we can certainly look to the past to see how drivers such as political instability, resource shortages and technological innovations have shaped the way we manipulate food. These insights might then help us to imagine how food processing, and more broadly food science, might respond to global food insecurity, health challenges and climate change to envision possible futures for food. And perhaps most importantly, it can help us to decide how we, as consumers, can help shape that future.

CHAPTER ONE

Have We Tinkered Too Much?

Of all the methods of food processing that I have read about, one sticks in my mind. As expected, this journey starts out with some basic recognisable ingredients. The ingredients are tipped into a macerator, where the physical and chemical transformation of the food starts. From the macerator, the pulverised food is pushed through a pipe to a mixer. Here, hydrochloric acid, water and enzymes are added and all of the contents are agitated over a period of two and a half to five hours in order to help homogenise the mixture into a paste. This thin paste then travels through a semi-permeable tube where cholic acid and chenodeoxycholic acid are added along with a cocktail of different catalysts that help speed up the chemical reactions occurring within the tube. All of the macronutrients in the paste – fats, proteins and carbohydrates – are broken into their component parts of fatty acids, amino acids and sugars, respectively. These are then diverted from the main tube for further processing and storage. The